contact info:

mailing address:

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

CB 1122

ONE BROOKINGS DR.

ST. LOUIS, MO 63130-4899

​Abram Van Engen’s research and teaching interests include early American literature and culture, Puritanism, sentimentalism, and religion. His current book project traces a history of John Winthrop's "city on a hill" sermon from 1630 to the present day.

Painting new pictures

The Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol is its physical and symbolic center, connecting the House of Representatives and Senate chambers and providing a setting for ceremonies such as presidential inaugurations and the lying in state of eminent persons. Scholar of early American literature Abram Van Engen tells the story of four historic paintings on display there and asks who and what they omit.

Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England

By Abram Van Engen

Revising dominant accounts of Puritanism and challenging the literary history of sentimentalism, Sympathetic Puritans argues that a Calvinist theology of sympathy shaped the politics, religion, rhetoric, and literature of early New England. Scholars have often understood and presented sentimentalism as a direct challenge to stern and stoic Puritan forebears; the standard history traces a cult of sensibility back to moral sense philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment, not Puritan New England. Abram C. Van Engen has unearthed pervasive evidence of sympathy in a large archive of Puritan sermons, treatises, tracts, poems, journals, histories, and captivity narratives. He demonstrates how two types of sympathy -- the active command to fellow-feel (a duty), as well as the passive sign that could indicate salvation (a discovery) -- permeated Puritan society and came to define the very boundaries of English culture, affecting conceptions of community, relations with Native Americans, and the development of American literature.

Van Engen re-examines the Antinomian Controversy, conversion narratives, transatlantic relations, Puritan missions, Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative -- and Puritan culture more generally -- through the lens of sympathy. Demonstrating and explicating a Calvinist theology of sympathy in seventeenth-century New England, the book reveals the religious history of a concept that has previously been associated with more secular roots.